The increased use of networks (such as the Internet) and networking technology has increased the quantity of data presented to individuals and organizations on a day-to-day basis. This data may be in the form of advertisements, news articles, and other information from any number of data sources. Although much of this data may be of interest to particular individuals and organizations, a significant portion of the data is generally of little or no value to the recipient. For example, the data may be related to a subject that is of no interest to the recipient or related to a type of product that the recipient does not use and does not intend to purchase.
Existing systems are available for selecting data to be provided to a particular user based on criteria that is supplied actively or passively by the user. These existing systems perform various filtering operations on a server to select the data to be provided to a particular user. Since these filtering operations are performed on a centralized server, the server must contain the necessary filtering criteria to select the data. These existing systems limit the effectiveness of the filtering operation because certain criteria necessary for proper filtering is confidential or private to the user and is not disclosed to the server. Since the server does not have this private information, it cannot adequately filter out all of the irrelevant data. For example, if a user does not indicate their age to the server, then the server cannot filter data that is directed at a particular age group. As a result, the user receives all data regardless of whether the data is relevant to a person in the user's age group.
Since the server is unable to filter data based on private criteria not provided to the server by the user, the user may receive a significant amount of irrelevant data. This irrelevant data is time consuming to review and creates a distraction from the user's normal work or activities. Since many servers that provide data filtering operations may not be trustworthy with respect to private information, many users are unwilling to provide private information to these servers. As a result, the user receives a significant amount of unwanted data.
Other known systems for filtering data perform all filtering operations on a client. These systems provide all data from all sources to the client, which then filters the data based on information provided by the user of the client. This approach significantly increases the amount of data received by the client and increases the bandwidth or transmission time required to transmit the data to the client from the data sources. The increase in data received by the client also increases the local storage requirements.
It is therefore desirable to provide a unified data filtering system capable of filtering out data that is not relevant to a particular user, without compromising the user's privacy.